Nicola Sturgeon’s defeat is imperative
The local elections this week will be a test of Boris Johnson’s Conservative strategy, its mix of economic centrism and cultural conservatism; the public response to the vaccine programme; and Labour’s dismal leadership. We must hope that the Tories do as well as possible, but the political dynamic across the country is far from uniform. First, there is London, where the Conservatives are struggling to beat Sadiq Khan, despite a record of failure that he has tried to patch over with shrill virtue-signalling.
Some might see giving up on London as a price worth paying for success in the Red Wall. This is a profound mistake. The Tories need metropolitan seats (the PM represents one); it cannot surrender the capital, the economic engine of the country, to an opposition that would kill growth; and it cannot deprive voters sick of Mr Khan their due representation. Populism must be recalibrated for the young and the urban: the Tories, running a more charismatic candidate, should have ruthlessly hit the mayor on crime, transport and housing. But the Tories have a problem here: their urbanism is currently of the Left, which means that all too often (and other than on crime) their views don’t actually differ from Labour’s.
In Scotland, meanwhile, nationalism eclipses routine politics, even fact itself, reducing everything to a binary in-or-out-of-the-Union debate that was supposed to have been settled by a once-in-a-generation vote in 2014.
When it comes to the detail of government, however, Scotland has fallen down international league tables in education. The SNP has failed to make meaningful progress in closing the attainment gap between rich and poor students. Nicola Sturgeon has described her own record on drug deaths as “indefensible”. She has forced on the country a controversial hate crime bill that critics call an assault on free speech. And while Scotland struggled to deal with Covid, made worse by the mistake of discharging patients into care homes, as was done in England, the SNP became bogged down in a war between Ms Sturgeon and Alex Salmond – a row that exposed how weakened and compromised Scottish institutions have become. The SNP still struggles to answer convincingly basic questions such as what currency it would use after independence or how it would manage its new border. The nationalists use elections, even high office, as a platform for pushing a referendum, yet they haven’t delivered real results for the country they want to ride off into the sunset.
If voters reject Ms Sturgeon, it’s a win-win: no referendum, no more nationalist incompetence, and the nation can focus on unlocking and kickstarting the economy. There is a romantic argument for Unionism; there is also common sense and material interest. Scotland is infinitely better off in the UK.
So is Northern Ireland, where there are no elections taking place but a leadership crisis is developing that could affect the politics of the entire Union. The Northern Ireland Protocol must go, or be somehow drastically reformed. Boris Johnson inherited it from Theresa May and had no choice but to retain it, but now that we are out of the EU a better solution must be renegotiated. The Protocol allows unilateral action if the social costs mount too much.
Here again, however, the Tories need to think more deeply: we need a workable solution for the province, not just Eurosceptic rhetoric. The threats to unionism pre-existed Brexit – blame lies primarily with Tony Blair’s constitutional tinkering, cynical nationalists and the failure to regenerate local economies – but there’s no denying the importance of proving that Brexit can be good for the entire UK. In the long-run that means economic reform, deregulation, trade, tax cuts (not the current increases) and, crucially, lifting the lockdown as soon as possible.
‘The Tories cannot surrender the economic engine of Britain to an opposition that would kill growth’